Adolph Hitler and the Occult

The Unknown Hitler: Nazi Roots in the Occult

On April 6, 1919, in Bavaria, left wing socialists and anarchists proclaimed the Bavarian Soviet
Republic. The brains of the revolution were a group of writers who had little idea of
administration. Life in munich grew chaotic. The counter-revolutionary forces, the whites,
composed of various groups of decommissioned soldiers known as "Frei Corps", equipped and
financed by the mysterious Thule Society, defeated the Bavarian Soviet within a matter of weeks.

Many other decommissioned soldiers waited out the turbulence in barracks, pfc Adolph Hitler
among them. After the Bavarian Republic had been defeated by the Whites, in May, Hitler's
superiors put him to work in the post revolution investigating commission. His indictments injected
ruthless efficiency into the kangaroo courts as he fingered hundreds of noncommissioned officers
and enlisted men who had sympathized with the communist and anarchists. He was subsequently
sent to attend special anticommunist training courses and seminars at the University which were
financed by the Reichswehr administration and by private donors from the Thule Society. This led
to an assignment in the intelligence division of the postwar German army, to infiltrate groups that
could organize the working classes while the communists were weak. On a September evening,
1919, Hitler turned up in the Sternecker Beer Hall where members and friends of the budding
German Workers Party had gathered.

He quietly listened to the presentation by engineer
Gottfried Feder, a Thule Society member, who talked about jewish control over lending capital.
When one of the other group members called for Bavaria to break away from the rest of
Germany, Hitler sprang into action. The astonished audience stood by while his highly aggressive
remarks and compelling oratory swept through the room. After Hitler had finished his harangue,
party chairman and founder, Anton Drexler, immediately asked him to a meeting of the party's
steering committee held a few days later. He was asked to join the committee as its seventh
member, responsible for advertising and propaganda.

Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-semitic inclinations decided to form a
"magic" lodge, which they named the Order of Teutons. the main founders were Theodor Fritsch,
a publisher of an anti-semitic journal; Philipp Stauff, pupil of the racist Guido Von List, and Hermann
Pohl, the order's chancellor. (Pohl would drop out three years later to found his own bizarre
lodge, the 'Walvater Teutonic Order of the Holy Grail'.)

The Order of Teutons was organized along
the lines of the Free Masons or the Rosicrucians, having differing degrees of initiation, only
persons who could fully document that they were of pure "aryan" ancestry were allowed to join.

In 1915, Pohl was joined by Rudolf Blauer, who held a Turkish passport and practiced sufi
meditation. He also dabbled in astrology and was an admirer of Lanz Von Liebenfels and Guido
Von List, both pathologically anti-semitic. Blauer went by the name of Rudolf Freiherr Von
Seboottendorf. He was very wealthy, although the origin of his fortune is unknown. He became
the Grand Master of the Bavarian Order and he founded the Thule Society, with Pohl's approval, in
1918.

After the Bavarian communist revolution of 1918, the Thule Society became a center of thea
counterrevolutionary subculture. An espionage network and arms caches were organized. The
Thule Club rooms became a nest of resistance to the revolution and the Munich Soviet Republic.

Journalist Karl Harrer was given the job of founding a political "worker circle". He realized that the
workers would reject any program that was presented to them by a member of the conservative
"privileged" class. Harrer knew that the mechanic Anton Drexler, who was working for the
railroads, was a well-known anti-semite, chauvinist and proletarian. With drexler as nominal
chairman, Harrer founded the German Workers Party in January 1919

The German Workers Party was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the
Thule Society. The Thule was the "mother" to the German Socialist Party, led by Julius Streicher,
and the right-wing radical Oberland Free Corps. It published the Munich observer, which later
became the National Observer. Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party. He
caused Harrer to drop out, and he pushed Drexler, the nominal chairman, to the sidelines. He filled
key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the Army. During the summer of
1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Worker Party
(NASDAP). The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians.

To go along with the new name his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol.
Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked the one suggested by Thule member Dr.
Krohn: a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika.

Hitler wanted to turn the German Workers Party into a mass-conscious fighting party, but Harrer
and Drexler were hesitant, due in part to their woeful financial situation. The Thule Society was
not yet supplying very much money and no one seemed to know how to build up a mass party.
Hitler arranged two public meetings in obscure beer halls, and he drafted leaflets and posters,
but there was no real breakthrough.

All of this changed dramatically at the end of the 1919 when Hitler met Dietrich Eckart. Most
biographers have underestimated the influence that Eckart exerted on Hitler. He was the wealthy
publisher and editor-in-chief of an anti-semitic journal which he called In Plain German. Eckart was
also a committed occultist and a master of magic. As an initiate, Eckart belonged to the inner
circle of the Thule Society as well as other esoteric orders.

Briefly, the creed of the Thule Society inner circle is as follows: Thule was a legendary island in
the far north, similar to Atlantis, supposedly the center of a lost, high-level civilization. But not all
secrets of that civilization had been completely wiped out. Those that remained were being
guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings (similar to the "Masters" of Theosophy or the White
Brotherhood). The truly initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of
magic-mystical rituals. The "Masters" or "Ancients" allegedly would be able to endow the initiated
with supernatural strength and energy. With the help of these energies the goal of the initiated
was to create a race of Supermen of "Aryan" stock who would exterminate all "inferior" races.

There can be no doubt that Eckart - who had been alerted to Hitler by other Thulists - trained
Hitler in techniques of self confidence, self projection, persuasive oratory, body language and
discursive sophistry. With these tools, in a short period of time he was able to move the obscure
workers party from the club and beer hall atmosphere to a mass movement. The emotion charged
lay speaker became an expert orator, capable of mesmerizing a vast audience.

One should not underestimate occultism's influence on Hitler. His subsequent rejection of Free
Masons and esoteric movements, of Theosophy, of Anthrosophy, does not necessarily mean
otherwise. Occult circles have long been known as covers for espionage and influence peddling.
Hitler's spy apparatus under Canaris and Heydrich were well aware of these conduits, particularly
from the direction of Britain which had within its MI5 intelligence agency a department known as
the Occult Bureau. That these potential sources of trouble were purged from Nazi life should not
be taken to mean that Hitler and the Nazi secret societies were not influenced by mystical and
occult writers such as Madame Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Guido Von List, Lanz Von
Liebenfels, Rudolf Steiner, George Gurdjieff, Karl Haushofer and Theodor Fritsch. Although Hitler
later denounced and ridiculed many of them, he did dedicate his book Mein Kampf to his teacher
Dietrich Eckart.

A frequent visitor to Landsberg Prison where Hitler was writing Mein Kampf with the help of Rudolf
Hess, was General Karl Haushofer, a university professor and director of the Munich Institute of
Geopolitics. Haushofer, Hitler, and Hess had long conversations together. Hess also kept records
of these conversations. Hitler's demands for German "Living Space" in the east at the expense of
the Slavic nations were based on the geopolitical theories of the learned professor. Haushofer
was also inclined toward the esoteric. as military attache in Japan, he had studied Zen-Buddhism.
He had also gone through initiations at the hands of Tibetan Lamas. He became Hitler's second
"esoteric mentor", replacing Dietrich Eckart.

In Berlin, Haushofer had founded the Luminous Lodge
or the Vril Society. The lodge's objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to
perform exercises in concentration to awaken the forces of "Vril". Haushofer was a student of the
Russian magician and metaphysician Gregor Ivanovich Gurdyev (George Gurdjieff).

Both Gurdjeiff
and Haushofer maintained that they had contacts with secret Tibetan Lodges that possessed the
secret of the "Superman". The lodge included Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Himmler, Goring, and
Hitler's subsequent personal physician Dr. Morell. It is also known that Aleister Crowley and
Gurdjieff sought contact with Hitler.

Hitler's unusual powers of suggestion become more
understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the "secret" psychological techniques
of the esoteric lodges. Haushofer taught him the techniques of Gurdjieff which, in turn, were
based on the teachings of the Sufis and the Tibetan Lamas- and familiarized him with the Zen
teaching of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.

From The Unknown Hitler by Wulf Schwartzwaller, Berkeley Books, 1990

The Men Behind Hitler - excerpts from the book by Bernard Schreiber

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was an English political economist and historian who in 1796
published a book called "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in which he said that poverty,
and thereby vice and misery, are unavoidable because population growth always exceeds food
production. Checks on population growth were wars, famine, and diseases.

Malthus's ideas had great impact, only a few asked on what his claims were actually based. Yet
neither Malthus nor his later disciples ever managed to put forward any scientific proof for his
theory. Many scientists have disproved Malthus' theory and the ideology resulting from it.

However, with the book, Malthus created an atmosphere which moved his adherents in 1834 to
pass a new law providing for the institution of work- houses for the poor, in which the sexes
were strictly separated to curb the otherwise inevitable overbreeding. This kind of philosophy
urged the calling forth of drastic measures. The full title of Charles Darwin's famous book is not
so famous: The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured
Races in the Struggle for Life. In it he explains the development of life-forms as a struggle for
existence. The result of this struggle would be a natural selection of those species and races
who were to triumph over those weaker ones who would perish.

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an english psychologist and a half-cousin of Darwin. Galton
extended Darwin's theory into a concept of deliberate social intervention, which he said was a
logical application of evolution to the human race. He called his theory "Eugenics", the principle of
which was that by encouraging better human stock to breed and discouraging the reproduction
of less desirable stock, the whole race could be improved.

Modern racism really began with Arthur Count de Gabon (1816-1882) who published his Essay on
the Inequality of Human Races. He wrote in of a fair-haired Aryan race that was superior to all the
others whose remnants constituted a tiny racial aristocracy decaying under the overwhelming
weight of inferior races. A revival of his work in Germany began ten years after his death by the
Pan-Germans, an extremely nationalistic and anti-jewish group.

In 1899, Gabon's disciple, Houston Stewart Chaimberlain (1844-1927), an Englishman, published
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in Germany. He upheld the German race to be the
purest and damned the inferior races, the jews and negroes, as degenerate. From this point on,
Eugenics, Social Darwinism and racial hygiene fused into a single concept.

In 1904 the first chairs in Eugenics were instituted at University College, London, followed by the
establishment of the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics in 1907. In 1910 the Eugenic Record
Office was founded in the United States, both institutes used the research results of the Galton
Laboratory of National Eugenics to propose practical applications. Eugenics was used an the
"scientific" basis upon which racism was fused to politics.

Eugenicists believed that the child of a mentally-ill person and a mentally heathy person would be
a mentally-ill offspring. This led to a series of escalating regimens: separation from society,
restraint, separation of the sexes in defective's colonies, and sterilizations.

In Great Britain one of
the leaders of the mental hygiene movement was Miss Evelyn Fox. She had been an active
member of the Eugenics Society before the foundation of the National Council for Mental Hygiene,
of which she was an officer and founder. among the board members was Sir Cyril Burt, who later
founded Mensa, a high i.q. group which espoused eugenic principles. The mental hygiene
movement drew strongly from the eugenic movements of whatever country they were in.

Shortly after the turn of the century eugenic organizations were set up throughout the world.
While the whole world was being prepared by propaganda for the sterilization of the insane, the
adherents of mental hygiene and eugenics were preparing their next step, euthanasia.

In the
U.S.A., Dr. Alexis Carrel, a nobel prize winner who had been on the staff of the Rockefeller
Institute since its inception, published his bookMan the Unknown in 1935. In it he suggests the
removal of the mentally ill and the criminal by small euthanasia institutions equipped with suitable
gases.

In 1933 the Nazi party rapidly consolidated its power. In June of that year, Minister of the Interior
Wilhelm Frick put in motion the passage of the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in
Posterity"- the sterilization law. Architect of the law was Ernst Rudin, professor of psychiatry at
the Munich University, director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealog, and of the Research
Institute for Psychiatry. A separate legal system was set up consisting of "Hereditary Health
Courts", which could decree sterilization against a person's will. By 1935 the "Nuremburg Laws"
intended to insure the racial purity of the nation and was aimed specifically at the Jews.

In 1934 the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Research was founded at Frankfurt University
by professor Ernst Rudin's colleague at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Dr. Otmar Freiherr Von
Verscheur. Von Verscheur's assistant there was Dr. Joseph Mengele.

In England, Dr. Charles Killick Millard, president of the Society of Medical Officers of Health,
brought up in 1931 the question of voluntary euthanasia and proposed a suitable law. Later he
became fellow founder of the Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society. In 1935 Lord Moynihan,
president of the Royal College of Surgeons, founded the Euthanasia Society .

Sterilization and euthanasia were not the ideas of the Nazis and never had been. They were ideas
which were supported and promoted throughout the world by groups with an interest in the
development of mental hygiene. Germany, however, was the only country in which the political
climate allowed materialization of the final goal of sterilization and euthanasia.

There is not a great deal known about "T4" compared to other aspects of Nazi Germany. T4 was
the Fuhrer Chancellery and the initials came from the full address which was Tiergartenstrasse 4,
Berlin. "Project T4" was fully integrated into the organizational structure of the Reich and fell
under section 11b. ("mercy-death") of the Chancellery of the Fuhrer. Four cover organizations
safeguarded the project T4: the Realms Work Committee in charge of collecting information on
candidates for euthanasia from questionnaires sent to hospitals, the Realms Committee for
Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity set up exclusively to apply euthanasia to
children, the charitable company for the transport of the sick which transported patients to the
killing centers, and the Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care, in charge of final disposition of
the victims' remains.

At the time the questionnaires went out a number of mental hospitals were being converted for
use as killing centers and schools for murder. Death chambers were built disguised as
shower-baths and crematoriums, which were identical to those later to be established in the
death camps in Poland.

Schooling of the personnel at Hadamar Mental Institution produced perfect murderers who were
used to the smell of burnt flesh, had been taught to trick people being led to their death and to
steel themselves against the crying and pleading of the victims. On arrival, the victims were
stripped, dressed in paper shirts and forthwith taken to a gas chamber where they were
murdered with hydrocyanic acid gas, and the bodies moved to crematoriums by conveyer belts,
six bodies to a furnace. The psychiatrist in charge at Hadamar was Dr. Adolf Wahlmann, an active
member of the German Mental Hygiene Movement.

After the state had been relieved of the burden of these undesireables, the operation, still under
the direction of eminent mental health psychiatrists in T4, was expanded under the code of
14F13. From being limited to mental hospitals and institutions, it now embraced German and
Austrian inmates and Jews in concentration camps who were sick or invalid. At Dachau at the end
of 1941 a commission composed of 4 psychiatrists under professor Dr. Werner Heyde, SS
Standartenfuhrer and lecturer in neurology and psychiatry at Wurzburg University, arrived at the
camp and selected hundred of patients incapable of work who were transported to the gas
chambers and disposed of.

The extermination camps had followed a separate evolution from the concentration camps that
were opened a few months after the Nazi rise to power. These death camps had their
headquarters, not in Himmler's SS organization, but in the Fuhrer's Chancellory (T4). Franz Stangl
(Austrian Gestapo) said at the Nuremberg trials that his progression to builder and commander of
the Sobibor Extermination Camp went through the Hartheim and Bernberg euthanasia centers. The
original staff at Sobibor was taken from Hartheim.

During the war eugenics became associated with the Nazis and afterwards a global whitewashing
began. The first step was the reconstitution of the many National Councils of Mental Hygiene. The
first was the British Association for Mental Health. Lady Prescilla Norman, wife of Montagu Norman,
governor of the Bank of England, had been working in the mental hygiene movement since the
20's. In 1944 they sponsored a congress held at the Ministry of Health in London where they
established the World Federation of Mental Health-WFMH.

The first elected president of the WFMH was Dr. John Rawlings Rees, a British psychiatrist
associated with the Tavistock Institute. In 1948 the WFMH was formally inaugurated at the Third
International Congress of Mental Health. A vice-president of the Congress was Dr. Carl G. Jung
who was described by fellow vice-president Dr. Conti as "representing German psychiatry under
the Nazis". Dr. Jung had been co-editor of the Journal for Psychotherapy with Dr. M. H. Goering,
the cousin of Marshal Hermann Goering.

It may be that the real key to the Third Reich lies buried in the history of Tibet, for it was here
that Karl Haushofer, the initiate who taught the youthful Hitler, first met in literal fact the
Superman of Nazi legend.

Origins of the swastika

By 1945 the Thousand Year Reich had become a smoking ruin. Russian soldiers pressed through
the rubble, fighting from house to house, from street to street in order to link up with their
British and American allies who also pressed in inexorably on the heart of the dying capital.
Before they overran the eastern sector of Berlin, these Russian troops came across something
very strange: vast numbers of Tibetan corpses. The fact is mentioned by Maurice Bessy and
again by Pauwels and Bergier, who set the actual number of bodies at a thousand. They wore
German uniform, but without the usual insignia of rank.

The religion of Tibet is Buddhism, but like the Zen of Japan, it is a brand of Buddhism far divorced
from the Indian original. Many scholars prefer the term "Lamaism" to distinguish between Tibetan
Buddhism and its parent root. The religious life of the country is concentrated in a multitude of
monasteries, many of them built in almost inaccessible mountain regions. Side by side with the
state religion of Lamaism, and flourishing particularly in the rural districts, is Tibet's aboriginal
religion of Bon. The Bon-Pas follow a primitive, animistic creed, full of dark rituals and spells. If the
holy Lamas of the Buddhist sects were looked on as personifications of spiritual wisdom, the
priests of Bon had a potent reputation with the common people as magicians.

The Nazi leaders were attracted to Tibet by those of its secret doctrines which filtered through
to the west. They believed, those members of the Thule group, the Luminous Lodge, and the
various other occult organizations which helped shape the Third Reich, in an esoteric history of
mankind. And it was in the archives of Tibetan monasteries that this history was preserved in its
purest form.

Already, in the latter half of the previous century, intriguing hints about Tibetan secret teachings
had been carried to the west by Helena Blavatsky, who claimed initiation at the hands of the Holy
Lamas themselves. Blavatsky taught that her "Hidden Masters" and "Secret Chiefs" had their
earthly residence in the Himalayan region. As soon as the Nazi movement had sufficient funds, it
began to organize a number of expeditions to Tibet and these succeeded one another practically
without interruption until 1943. One of the most tangible expressions of Nazi interest in Tibet was
the party`s adoption of its deepest and most mystical of symbols-the swastika.

The swastika is one of mankind's oldest symbols, and apart from the cross and the circle,
probably the most widely distributed. It is shown on pottery fragments from Greece dating back
to the eighth century BC. It was used in ancient Egypt, India and China. The Navaho indians of
North America have a traditional swastika pattern. Arab-Islamic sorcerers used it. In more recent
times, it was incorporated in the flags of certain baltic states.

The idea for the use of the swastika by the Nazis came from a dentist named Dr. Friedrich Krohn
who was a member of the secret Germanen order. Krohn produced the design for the actual form
in which the Nazis came to use the symbol, that is reversed, spinning in an anti-clockwise
direction. As a solar symbol, the swastika is properly thought of as spinning, and the Buddhists
have always believed the symbol attracted luck. The Sanskrit word "svastika" means good fortune
and well being. According to Cabbalistic lore and occult theory, chaotic force can be evoked by
revers- ing the symbol. And so the symbol appeared as the flag of Nazi Germany and the insignia
of the Nazi party, an indication for those who had eyes to see, as to the occult nature of the
Third Reich.

The Controversy off the Occult ReichBy John Roemer

One hundred years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria on April 20 1889, and
decades after his malign empire metastasized in Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler phenomenon
remains to mainstream historians largely inexplicable, or at least unexplained. The man and his
awful work seem to stand outside history looking in. Perhaps our human fear of the irrational
is so great that we instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need not admit
him to our company.

In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature exists seeking an occult
rationale for the otherwise baffling catastrophe Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and
Jacques Bergier point out in the Morning of the Magicians(1960), the Nazi era simply
defies conventional analysis:

A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of megalomaniacs,rejects
Descartes, spurns the whole humanist culture, tramples on reason, invokes
Lucifer, conquers Europe, and nearly conquers the world. The historian begins to
feel anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable.

Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a black magical explanation
for the Third Reich. About a quarter of their book is devoted to a region they call "The
Absolute Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi pseudosciences and occult methodology held
official sway. They quote a Hitlerian pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's
intellectual development was on a level wholly different from that understood by the Western
tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist science which is opposed to Jewish-Liberal
science".2 Reality was defined by politics.

Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold to the Cartesian model. In
place of psychology there was an occult frappe composed of the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the
theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the archetypes of Nordic mythology. In place of
Newtonian physics stood the cosmic force called vril, the bizarre geology known as the
hollow earth theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine of
eternal ice.

Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not very helpful in explaining
the etiology of great evil, although Robert G.L. Waite's effort, quoted above and published in
1977 by Basic Books, is good on several provocative subjects: Hitler's sadomasochistic sex
life; the possibility he had a Jewish grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described
at greater length by the authors about to be mentioned.

Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish science". Not only Freud but
Einstein too was forced to flee Hitler's Europe. He and other physicists eventually were able
to ensure that atomic secrets remained in the hands of the allies until they could be used
spectacularly to climax the Pacific war.

Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced late in the nineteenth
century. " As a young engineer," he wrote, "I was watching one day some molten steel
poured on wet ground covered with snow: the ground exploded after some delay and with
great violence."

This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired Horbiger and resonated for
German nationalists because it recurs in the Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic
mythology. It all makes good sense in Iceland, since that island's peculiar geology feature
numerous volcanic rifts in the permafrost; fire and ice are commonly juxtaposed all over the
landscape. As grounds for a cosmology- the word implies universality- it is at best dubious. It
would be a hard sell in Hawaii.

Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to its objective validity.
Hoerbiger was immensely influential in the Third Reich. His followers numbered in the tens of
thousands. There were scores of Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre pamphlets,
and a monthly magazine called The Key to World Events.

Unfortunately, Hitler never inventoried his books, and
the only detailed accounting of his libraries comes
courtesy of the former United Press correspondent
Frederick Oechsner, who met Hitler repeatedly and
was evidently able to acquaint himself intimately with the
Fhrer's book collections. "I found that his personal library,
which is divided between his residence in the Chancellery in
Berlin and his country home on the Obersalzberg at
Berchtesgaden, contains roughly 16,300 books," Oechsner
wrote in his best-selling book This Is the Enemy (1942).

According to Oechsner, the biggest single share of Hitler's
library, some 7,000 books, was devoted to military matters,
in particular "the campaigns of Napoleon, the Prussian kings;
the lives of all German and Prussian potentates who ever
played a military role; and books on virtually all the
well-known military campaigns in recorded history."

Another
1,500 volumes concerned architecture, theater, painting,
and sculpture. "One book on the Spanish theater has
pornographic drawings and photographs, but there is no
section on pornography, as such, in Hitler's Library,"
Oechsner wrote. The balance of the collection consisted of
clusters of books on diverse themes ranging from nutrition
and health to religion and geography, with "eight hundred
to a thousand books" of "simple, popular fiction, many of
them pure trash in anybody's language."

By his own admission, Hitler was not a big fan of novels,
though he once ranked Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe,
Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Don Quixote (he had a special
affection for the edition illustrated by Gustave Dor) among
the world's greatest works of literature.

The one novelist
we know Hitler loved and read was Karl May, a German
writer of cheap American-style westerns. In the spring of
1933, just months after the Nazis seized power, Oskar
Achenbach, a Munich-based journalist, toured the
Berghof in the Fhrer's absence and discovered a shelf
of Karl May novels at Hitler's bedside. "The bedroom of the
Fhrer is of spartan simplicity," Achenbach reported in the
Sonntag Morgenpost. "Brass bed, closet, toiletries, a few
chairs, those are all the furnishings. On a bookshelf are
works on politics and diplomacy, a few brochures and
books on the care of German shepherds, and then pay
attention you German boys! Then comes an entire row of
books by Karl May! Winnetou, Old Surehand, Bad Guy, all
our dear old friends." During the war Hitler reportedly
admonished his generals for their lack of imagination and
recommended that they all read Karl May. Albert Speer
recounted in his Spandau diaries,

Hitler was wont to say that he had always been
deeply impressed by the tactical finesse and
circumspection that Karl May conferred upon his
character Winnetou ... And he would add that
during his reading hours at night, when faced by
seemingly hopeless situations, he would still
reach for those stories, that they gave him
courage like works of philosophy for others or
the Bible for elderly people.

No one knows the exact extent of Hitler's library. Though
Oechsner estimated the original collection at 16,000
volumes, Gassert and Mattern assert that it is impossible to
determine the actual dimensions, especially since the
majority of the books were either burned or plundered in
the final weeks of the war an assumption confirmed in part
by Florian Beierl, the head of the Archive for the
Contemporary History of the Obersalzberg, in
Berchtesgaden.

According to Beierl, Hitler's Berghof
experienced successive waves of looters: first local
residents, then French and American soldiers, and
eventually members of the U.S. Senate. Beierl showed me
archival film footage (taken by the legendary World War II
photographer Walter Rosenblum) of a delegation of
American senators Burton Wheeler, Homer Capehart, and
Ernest McFarland emerging from the Berghof ruins with
books under their arms. "I doubt if they were taking them
to the Library of Congress," Beierl said.

I have also been told that a portion of the Hitler Library may
have been seized by the Red Army. "Stalin was so paranoid
about Hitler that he sent trophy brigades to search for
anything connected with him," says Konstantin Akinsha, a
former researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission
on Holocaust Assets in the United States. "His skull, his
uniforms, Eva Braun's dresses, her underwearÑthey are all
in Moscow." Akinsha told me recently that in the early
1990s he heard rumors about a depository in an
abandoned church in Uzkoe, a suburb of Moscow, that
allegedly contained a huge quantity of "trophy books,"
including some that had belonged to Hitler.

Grigory Kozlov, another "trophy" sleuth, confirms that a
"secret depository" did indeed exist in Uzkoe for more than
four decades, with tens of thousands of books stacked
from floor to ceiling. "At the beginning of 1995 there was a
big discussion about trophy books," Kozlov told me. "They
decided to remove these books from Uzkoe and destroy all
traces that showed there had been some sort of secret
depository there." Now, he says, the books have been
dispersed anonymously in libraries and archives across
Russia. "I don't know what's true or not," Kozlov told me.
"Books were evacuated without records, confiscated
without records. I don't know if anyone is ready to talk."

The 1,200 of Hitler's books in the Library of Congress
most likely represent less than 10 percent of the
original collection. Nevertheless, when I first visited
the Hitler Library, in April of 2001, I was surprised to
discover that despite the incompleteness of the collection,
I could easily discern the collector preserved within his
books. In more than 200 World War I memoirs, including
Ernst Jnger's Fire and Blood, with a personal inscription to
"the Fhrer," I encountered Hitler the "Austrian corporal,"
with his bushy moustache, his somber demeanor, and his
battlefield service, during which he was twice wounded and
for which he was twice decorated, once with the Iron Cross
first class.

In two olive-drab paperbacks, guidebooks to the cultural
monuments of Brussels and Berlin, published by Seemann
Verlag and costing three marks each, I glimpsed Hitler the
aspiring Frontsoldat-cum-artist. The Berlin guide has Hitler's
signature in faded purple ink on the inside front cover, with
the place and month of purchase: "Fournes, 22 November
1915." In the Brussels guide Hitler simply scrawled "A.
Hitler" in pencil; the last three letters trail downward like
unspooling ribbon. A chapter on Frederick the Great is
especially worn, its pages tattered, marked with
fingerprints, and smeared with red candle wax. Tucked in
the crease between pages 162 and 163 I found a
three-quarter-inch strand of stiff black hair.

In dozens of books, with salutations from the likes of Prince
August Wilhelm son of the last German Kaiser and the
heirs of the Bechstein piano dynasty, I saw Hitler the
protg of Germany's financial, social, and cultural elite. One
book on Fhrertum "leadership" was presented to Hitler
by the industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who had introduced him
to some of Germany's leading businessmen at a decisive
meeting in Dsseldorf in January of 1932.

"To the Fhrer,
Adolf Hitler, in memory of his presentation to the
Dsseldorf Industrial Club," Thyssen wrote on the inside
cover. Several books are inscribed to Hitler from Richard
Wagner's youngest daughter, Eva, who had married
Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain was an
anti-Semitic Englishman best known for his book The
Foundations of the 19th Century, in which he advanced the
thesis that Jesus was of Aryan rather than Semitic blood.
Hitler read Chamberlain during his Vienna period, and had a
brief audience with the aging anti-Semite at the Wagner
estate shortly before being sent to Landsberg Prison. "You
know Goethe's differentiation between force and force,"
Chamberlain wrote Hitler in October of 1923. "There is force
which comes from chaos and leads to chaos, and there is
force which is destined to create a new world." Chamberlain
credited Hitler with the latter.

In a French vegetarian cookbook with an inscription from its
author, Maa Charpentier, I encountered Monsieur Hitler
vgtarien. And I found hints of Hitler the future mass
murderer in a 1932 technical treatise on chemical warfare
that explores the varying qualities of poison gas, from
chlorine to prussic acid (Blausure). The latter was
produced commercially as Zyklon B, which would be
notorious for its use in the Nazi extermination camps.

I also found, however, a Hitler I had not anticipated: a man
with a sustained interest in spirituality. Among the piles of
Nazi tripe (much of it printed on high-acid paper that is
rapidly deteriorating) are more than 130 books on religious
and spiritual subjects, ranging from Occidental occultism to
Eastern mysticism to the teachings of Jesus Christ books
with titles such as Sunday Meditations; On Prayer; A
Primer for Religious Questions, Large and Small; Large
Truths About Mankind, the World and God.

Also included
were a German translation of E. Stanley Jones's 1931 best
seller, The Christ of the Mount; and a 500-page work on
the life and teachings of Jesus, published in 1935 under the
title The Son: The Evangelical Sources and Pronouncements
of Jesus of Nazareth in Their Original Form and With the
Jewish Influences. Some volumes date from the early
1920s, when Hitler was an obscure rabble-rouser on the
fringe of Munich political life; others from his last years,
when he dominated Europe.

One leather-bound tome with WORTE CHRISTI, or "Words of
Christ," embossed in gold on the cover was well worn, the
silky, supple leather peeling upward in gentle curls along
the edges. Human hands had obviously spent a lot of time
with this book. The inside cover bore a dedication: "To our
beloved Fhrer with gratitude and profound respect, Clara
von Behl, born von Jansen von den Osten. Christmas 1935."

Worte Christi was so fragile that when the attendant
brought it to me, he placed it on a red-velvet pad in a
wooden reading stand, a beautifully finished oak
contraption with two supports that could be adjusted with
small brass pegs to fit the dimensions of the book. No more
than a foot wide and eighteen inches long, the stand had a
sacred air, as if it belonged on an altar.

I reviewed the table of contents "Belief and Prayer," "God
and the Kingdom of God," "Priests and Their Religious
Practices," "The World and Its People" and skimmed the
introduction; then I scanned the book for marginalia that
might suggest a close study of the text. A white-silk
bookmark, preserved in its original perfection between
pages 22 and 23 (only the portion exposed to the air had
deteriorated), lay across a description of the Last Supper
as related by Saint John. A series of pages that followed
contained only a single aphorism each: "Believe in God"
(page 31), "Have no fear, just believe" (page 52), "If you
believe, anything is possible" (page 53), and so on, all the
way to page 95, which offers the solemn wisdom "Many are
called but few are chosen."

On page 241 appears the passage "You should love God,
your Lord, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your
spirit: this is the foremost and greatest commandment.
Another is equally important: Love your neighbor as you
would love yourself." Beside this passage is one brief
penciled line, the only mark in the entire book.

Given Hitler's legendary disdain for organized religion in
general and Christianity in particular, I didn't expect him to
have devoted much time to the teachings of Christ, let
alone to have marked this quintessential Christian virtue.
Had this in fact been made by the pencil of Hitler's younger
sister, Paula, who occasionally visited her brother at the
Berghof and remained a devout Catholic until her dying day?
Might some other Berghof guest have responded to this
holy Scripture?

Possibly but though most of the spiritually oriented books
in the Hitler Library were gifts sent to the Fhrer by distant
admirers, several, like Worte Christi, were obviously well
read, and some contained marginalia in Hitler's hand that
suggested a serious exploration of spiritual matters. If
Hitler was as deeply engaged with spiritual issues as his
books and their marginalia suggest, then what was the
purpose of this pursuit?

In the spring of 1943, while the outcome of World War II
hung in the balance, the U.S. Office of Strategic
Services forerunner to the CIA commissioned Walter
Langer, a Boston-based psychoanalyst, to develop a
"psychological profile" of Adolf Hitler. As Langer later
recalled, this was the first time the U.S. government had
attempted to psychoanalyze a world leader in order to
determine "the things that make him tick."

Over the course of eight months, assisted by three field
researchers and advised by three other experts in
psychology, Langer compiled more than a thousand
typewritten, single-spaced pages of material on his
"patient": texts from speeches, excerpts from Mein Kampf,
interviews with former Hitler associates, and virtually every
printed source available. Langer wrote,

A survey of all the evidence forces us to
conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to
become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be
the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder
of a new social order for the world. He firmly
believes this and is certain that in spite of all
the trials and tribulations through which he must
pass he will finally attain that goal. The one
condition is that he follow the dictates of the
inner voice that have guided and protected him
in the past.

In his summary Langer outlined eight possible scenarios for
Hitler's course of action in the face of defeat. The most
likely scenario, he suggested in a prescient moment, was
that Hitler's belief in divine protection would compel him to
fight to the bitter end, "drag[ging] a world with us a world
in flames," and that ultimately he would take his own life.

Langer based his assessment not only on Hitler's repeated
references to "divine providence," both in speeches and in
private conversations, but also on reports from some of
Hitler's most intimate associates that Hitler truly believed
he was "predestined" for greatness and inspired by "divine
powers." After the war Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, one
of Hitler's chief military advisers, seemed to confirm the
Langer thesis. "Looking back," he said, "I am inclined to think
he was literally obsessed with the idea of some miraculous
salvation, that he clung to it like a drowning man to a
straw."

Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter
of Hitler's spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler
consciously constructed an image of himself as a messianic
figure, and eventually came to believe the very myth he had
helped to fashion. "The more he succumbed to the allure of
his own Fhrer cult and came to believe in his own myth,
the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own
infallibility," Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987). But
believing in a messianic myth is not the same as believing in
God.

When I asked Kershaw in 2001 whether he thought
Hitler actually believed in divine providence, he dismissed
the notion. "I don't think that he had any real belief in a
deity of any sort, only in himself as a 'man of destiny' who
would bring about Germany's 'salvation,'" he declared.
Gerhard Weinberg, who helped sort through the Hitler
Library back in the 1950s, likewise dismisses the notion of
Hitler as a religious believer, insisting that he was driven by
the twin passions of Blut und Boden racial purity and
territorial expansion. "He didn't believe in anything but
himself," Weinberg told me last summer. Most historians
tend to agree.

Some non-historians, however, have different views. In the
1960s Friedrich Heer, a prominent and controversial
Viennese theologian, identified Hitler as a misguided
"Austrian Catholic," a man whose faith was disastrously
misplaced but nevertheless sincere. In a dense, 750-page
treatise Heer saw Hitler the Austrian Catholic at every turn:
the nine-year-old choirboy catching his first glimpse of a
swastika in the coat of arms at the Lambach Monastery; the
beer-hall orator whose speeches resound with biblical
allusions; the Fhrer of the Reich who re-created the
splendor of the Catholic mass at the annual Nuremberg
rally.

Even his virulent hatred of Jewry found sustenance in
those roots. Fritz Redlich, an eminent Yale psychiatrist,
asserts in his book, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive
Prophet, that Hitler acted from a profound belief in God.
Noting Hitler's own words "Man kommt um den
Gottesbegriff nicht um" ("You cannot get around the
concept of God"), Redlich told me last summer that he was
certain Hitler believed in a "divine creature." He rejected
suggestions that Hitler's invocations of the divine were little
more than cynical public posturing and insisted that we
ought to take Hitler at his word: "In a way, Hitler was a
terrible liar, but he was a tactical liar. In his essential line of
thinking he was honest."

Traudl Junge, Hitler's former secretary, would not go so far
as to say that Hitler believed in God, but she did believe
that Hitler's repeated references to the divine were more
than just for show. Junge who died of cancer in February
of last year told me the previous summer that Hitler spoke
of such things in private as well as in public. After two and
a half years of daily contact with Hitler, she was convinced
that he believed in some form of divine protection,
especially after surviving a dramatic assassination attempt
in 1944. "After the July 1944 attack," she told me, "I believe
he felt himself to be an instrument of providence, and
believed he had a mission to fulfill."

Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is why a
belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men. It was Austrian, Hitler,
who drove out the Jewish politicians, and another Austrian, Horbiger, (who) will
drive out the Jewish scientists. By his own example Hitler has shown that an
amateur to give us a thorough understanding of the Universe.

Hitler's fatal confidence in the success of his troops on the Russian front during the 1941 - 2
winter is generally believed to have been a result of his misplaced faith in Horbiger's weather
forecasts. Despite such setbacks, the Welteislehre managed to thrive even after the war.
The popular speculations of Immanuel Velikovsky derive in part from Horbiger. In 1953 a
survey conducted by Martin Gardner showed that more than a million people in Germany,
England, and the U.S. believed that Horbiger was right.

The Horbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen million years ago, during
which a hugh moon moved across the sky very near the earth. Its gravitational attraction
gave rise to a race of our ancestors, the giants. These giants, which appear in the ancient
Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep, yet they are alive. To the Nazis, they were Supermen. In
one set of myths, contained in the Nibelungenlied, they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In
another they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast Tibetan caverns.

Three other books that investigate hidden influences on Gerald Suster's Hitler: The Occult Messiah;
Jean-Michel Angebert's The Occult and the Third Riech and Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism.

Suster's book largely rehashes Pauwels and Bergier. Angebert (actually a pen name for two
French writers) interestingly links Hitler to an ancient dualist tradition he traces from
Manichaenism in Persia through the Essenes, Jesus's Palestinian forebears, to the Cathars in
the south of France in the Middle Ages. It's philosophy in which, in its Nazi incarnation, solar
forces of light represented by blond, fair-skinned Aryans strive against the evil forces of
darkness, who are of course dark skinned Semites.

Both books, but especially Suster's are written in prose that stops just this side of tabloid
journalese. This is too bad for two reasons. One, the authors diminish some important material
by this kind of presentation. Two, the lessons we have to learn about mass psychopathology
and about the history of fascism are too important to be trivalized in this way.

Goodrick-Clark's is a serious and compelling historical look at ariosophy, a dangerous amalgam
of Aryan racism, pan-German nationalism, and occultism that flourished in Austria and Germany
from around 1890 well into the era when Himmler's Death's Head SS was organized. Himmler is
said by Pauwels and Bergier to have taken the Jesuits for his model, and to have installed a
regular hierarchy ranging from lay brothers to father superior, and to have used this Black
Order in horrific rites.8

The Occult Roots of Nazismidentifies wide circle of proto-Nazi philosophers, previously
almost unknown, who saw in the chaos that beset Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the
working out of ancient Aryan prophecies. Among them was Rudolf John Gorsleben, who
interesting career Goodrick-Clarke sums up in a sentence: "on the basis of the runes,
occultism, and the Edda, Gorsleben created an original racist mystery-religion which illuminated
the priceless magical heritage of the Aryans and justified their spiritual and political
world-supremacy."

Gorsleben was active in right-wing politics in Bavaria in the years Hitler was forming his
political convictions there, and he lectured to the Thule Society, a Munich club thought to
have greatly influenced Nazism in its infancy. He also edited a weekly newspaper
called German Freedom; in 1927 he changed the name to Aryan Freedom.

He derived the word 'race' from rata, an Old Norse term meaning 'root', in order to conclude
that God and race were identical. He maintained that racial mixing was always detrimental for
the racially superior partner, since his purity was debased in the progeny, and he repeated
the common volkisch [folkish] conviction that woman could be 'impregnated' by intercourse,
even when no conception occurred, so that her subsequent offspring bore the
characteristics of her first lover. Given these overwhelming pressures towards the increasing
bastardization of the German descendants of the Aryan race, only the strict practice of
segregation and eugenics could guarantee the reversal of racial contamination in the world.

Another book which hold that Hitler learned many of his occult lesson from avatars in Vienna
and Munich may well be the best known black magical explanation of Nazism to have been put
forth so far. Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny was published by that famous British
house of occultism, the aptly named Neville Spearman Ltd,.in 1972, and has since gone
through many edition.

Ravenscroft is intriguing because instead of reporting historical influences on Hitler, he
presents secret history in a narrative form that purports to be factual and that-if true maybe
even if only poetically "true"-goes a long way toward finding a convincing occult explanation
for the Nazi phenomenon.

Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led some readers to conclude
his book is more nearly a novel than strict history. Nonetheless, its provocative premise and
fluent synthesis of black magical thematics will keep it on occult booklists until a better effort
at explaining Hitler comes along.

Ravenscroft, a British journalist, historian, and World War II commando officer, spent four
years in Nazi prison camps after he was captured attempting to assassinate General Erwin
Rommel in North Africa in 1941. His personal perspective on the Hitler era is based on
material he says he got in a state of transcendent consciousness while imprisoned. He
introduces his methodology by speaking of: my own experience of higher levels of consciousness whilst in a Nazi
Concentration Camp during the war, and how the nature of this transcendent
experience had guided me to a study of the Spear of Longinus and the legend of
world destiny which had grown up around it.

Later, in London, his intuitive suspicions about certain grail relics and their importance in
occult Hitlerian history were confirmed by a Viennese exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein
who died in 1957.

Dr. Stein spent much of the war as a British secret agent, but before that time he was a
scholar who employed white magical means to clairvoyantly investigate historical events. It
was his book on the grail mythos published in Stuttgart in 1928 and titled The Ninth Century:
World History in the Light of the Holy Grailthat attracted Ravenscroft to
him.

The Spear of Destinyfocuses first on Hitler's lost years in Vienna from 1909 to 1913. During
that time, Ravenscroft writes, Dr. Stein was pursuing his occult researches as a student at
the University of Vienna and getting to know Hitler, then a dropout living in a flophouse.

Vienna was during Hitler's years there a vortex of modern thinking. Freud was in practice at
Berggasse; Ludwig Wittgenstein was in residence pondering avant garde philosophy and
metaphysics; Gustav Mahler had returned home to die and to name his protege, Arnold
Schonberg. In contrast there persisted the deep anti-Semitic currents that had caused Mahler
to convert to Catholicism, that forced Freud eventually to flee to London and that informed
the ancient pan-German folkoric nostalgia espoused by Guido von List.

This old black magician, whose occult lodge Ravenscroft says substituted the swastika for
the cross in perversion and the practice of medieval thaumaturgy, looked like a wizard in
floppy cap and long white beard. His link to Hitler was allegedly through an occult bookseller,
Ernst Pretzche, in whose shop the future Fuhrer found a second home.

In the shop Dr. Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the medieval grail
romance that Dr. Stein was himself researching for his work on the ninth century. In the
book's margins were handwritten annotations; looking them over Dr.Stein was fascinated and
repelled:

This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had achieved
more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator had
found the key to unveiling many of the deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously
spurned the Christian ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious
machinations of the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the
footnotes of Satan!

The footnotes, of course, proved to have been Hitler's. Soon afterward, Dr.Stein and Hitler
saw the Reich's lance together in the Imperial Museum at the Hofburg. Dr. Stein had been
there before and had never failed to be moved by the sight of the old relic, supposed to
have been moved by the original spear with which the Roman centurion, Longinus, pierced the
side of Christ during the crucifixation. Longinus was a German, and his "spear of destiny" was
fated to play a magical role in the careers of German leaders like Charlemagne, Otto the
Great, and Frederick Barbarossa. Dr. Stein said the spear inspired in him the emotion
expressed in the motto of the knights of the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen, "through
compassion to self knowledge."

Then he glanced at Hitler:

Walter Stein found he was not the only one moved by the sight of this historic spearhead.
Adolf Hitler stood beside him, like a man in a trance, a man over whom some dreadful magic
spell had been cast... The very space around him seemed enlivened with some subtle
irradiation, a kind of ghostly ectoplasmic light. His whole physiognomy and stance appeared
transformed as if some might Spirit now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him
a kind of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power.

Latter Hitler took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic teacher, a rustic woodcutter and
herbalist named Hans Lodz "who retained in his peasant's blood the last traces of the
atavistic clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes" and who "resembled a mischievous yet
malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales or an illustration from a book on
ancient Germanic folklore".16 The men took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein noticed that
Hitler had only one testicle.

It was Lodz, Dr.Stein learned, who had prepared for Hitler a peyote concoction that afforded
him psychedelic insight into his past lives. The peyote itself had come from Pretzche, who had
lived for a time in the German colony in Mexico. Hitler had hoped that his former existences,
viewed in his drug trance, would include an early incarnation as a powerful Teutonic ruler, but
it was not to be.

Instead his psychedelic perception revealed non Eschenbach's Parzival to have been
prophetic of events that would take place a thousand years after it was written, i.e. in the
present. And it showed Hitler to have been the historical personage behind the evil sorcerer
Klingsor, the very spirit of the anti-Christ and the villain of Parzival.

According to Dr. Stein's work Klingsor was in fact Landulf II of Capua, the traitorous confidant
of the Holy Roman Emperor who betrayed Christianity to the Moslem invaders of Italy and
Spain.

Armed with the knowledge of his black spiritual ancestry, Ravenscroft writes, Hitler moved to
Germany, joined the Bavarian Army, survived the hellish trench warfare on the western front,
won the Iron Cross, second class, and got discharged in Munich where he encountered the
men who were to invent National Socialism.

Virtually every study of Hitler's time in Munich mentions the Thule Society as superficially a
kind of Elk's Club of German mythology which met often and openly at a fancy metropolitan
hotel and for a time counted Hitler as a member. Behind the scenes, however the society
seems to have been considerably more sinister.

Robert Payne whose excellent Hitler biography contains no occult explanations, describes the
Thule Society as the center of the right wing opposition to the brief Bavarian postwar
socialist coup under the Jewish intellectual Kurt Eisner.

The reaction set in swiftly, as the extreme right gathered its forces. The
headquarters of the reaction was the Hotel Vierjahreszeiten, where several floors
were given over to the Thule Society, ostensibly a literary club devoted to the
study of Nordic culture but in fact a secret political organization devoted to
violent anti-Semitism and rule by an aristocratic elite. The name of the organization
derived from ultima Thule, the unknown northern land believed to be the original
home of the German race.

The symbol of the Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in laurel leaves.

Most of the occult historians of the era believe the Thule Society operated on a deeper level
still, a level headed by a mysterious figure called Dietrich Eckart. Goodrick-Clarke calls Eckart
Hitler's mentor in the early days of the Nazi Party, along with Rudolf Hess and Alfred
Rosenberg.18

According to Ravenscroft, Eckart, like Hitler, first achieved transcendence through
psychedelic drugs. Research on peyote by the German pharmacologist Ludwig Lewin had
been published in 1886, leading to widespread popular experimentation. Later a heroin
addict, in earlier days Eckart used peyote in the practice on neo- pagan magic in Berlin. He
came to believe that he, too was the reincarnation of ninth century character. In his case it
was Bernard of Barcelona, a notorious betrayer of Christianity to the Arabs and a black
magician who used thaumaturgy to hold off Carolingian armies in Spain.

Eckart assertedly organized Kurt EIsner's assassination and personally chose Hitler-by then a
battle-scarred veteran of the horrors of trench warfare and a fervent critic of the
armistice-to lead the Aryan race back to supremacy.

Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had been prepared for satanic initiation by his experiences in
Vienna with peyote and with the spear and by his mustard gassing in 1918, which left him
blind and in a state of enforced trance for several days.

He also says that the techniques Dietrich Eckart used were in part derived from the sexual
magic of Aleister Crowley. In 1912 this famed British magician was named IX British head of a
secret Berlin lodge called Ordo Templi Orientis which practiced various forms of sexual
magic.19

Ravenscroft writes "there can be little doubt" that both Crowley and Eckart conducted deep
studies of the Arabian astrological magic performed by Klingsor's real life counterpart, Landulf
II. It was to Sicily-then a Moslem stronghold-that Landulf fled after his traitorous links to Islam
were disclosed. And it was in a dark tower in the mountains of the southwest corner of that
island that his evil soul festered with additional bitterness over his castration by the relatives
of a noblewoman he had raped. There he practiced sadistic satanism of a nature that
foreshadowed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.

If the legends that have come down from these dark centuries of European
history are true, these rituals carried out at Kalot Enbolot included terrible
tortures such as the slitting open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and the slow
drawing open of the stomach of sacrificial victims and the slow drawing of their
entrails, the driving of stakes through the orifices of their bodies before
disembowelling them, and the invoking of Spirits of Darkness (incubis) to rape
young virgins kidnapped from their families.

It was from his studies of the power available to practitioners of such perversities that Eckart
devised the rituals he used when he "opened the centers of Adolf Hitler to give him a vision
of and a means of communication with the Powers." Ravenscroft concludes, though he
declines to furnish the full details: "Suffice it to say that they were indescribably sadistic and
ghastly."

Having done his worst, Eckart soon died, proudly advising those around him:

Follow Hitler! he will dance, but it is I who have called the tune!

I have initiated him into theSecret Doctrine, opened his centers of vision and
given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall
have influenced history more than any other German.

Not unnaturally the question rises whether any of The Spear of Destinyis true. It's certainly
a great story, one which Ravenscroft elaborates with a lengthy investigation of Hitler's sex
life, in which he makes a case for associating the reports of the Fuehrer's missing testis to
the perversities resulting from Landulf's castration.

The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein. And the
problem with Dr.Stein is really two problems: one his method of historical research: and two,
the fact that he is dead and unable to speak for himself.

Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be insurmountable. Had we the
technique, Dr. Stein could presumably verify each of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from
beyond the grave. For Dr. Stein is alleged to have studied history not in the libraries and
archives that are the usual haunt of the historian but in an arena called the Cosmic Chronicle
where, according to Ravenscroft, past present and future were united in a higher dimension
of time.

What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein taught the same techniques to
him.

It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to footnote clairvoyance. We have to
take on faith that the The Spear of Destiny is what Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say
that all of his information came from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein as we have seen is
purported to have been present in Vienna during Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close
association end in Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close quarters" the
founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart and other sinister mentors.

When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's arrest in Stuttgart in
1933 in order to press him into service with the SS Occult Bureau, he escaped
from Germany and brought with him to Britain the most authoritative knowledge of
the occultism of the Nazi Party.

Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking about eyewitness knowledge
on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of information to be gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle.
But two critics of the The Spear of Destinydo cast doubt on several of the factual assertions
upon the factual assertions upon which Ravenscroft's argument is built.

One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots of Nazism is quoted above.
In an appendix called The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism, Goodrick-Clarke takes
Ravenscroft to task for the story about Hitler's relations with the occult
bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was forced to flee from outraged
Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the sexual rites of his blood brotherhood were exposed. he
writes flatly,

There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals. List was never obliged to leave
Vienna and he enjoyed the patronage of prominent Vienna figures...The fictional
nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is
suggested by the similarity of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one
described by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni, (1842), which probably served
Ravenscroft as a literary model.

Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book, The Occult and the Third Reich,
cited above. He brands as imaginary Angebert's account of the young Hitler's
association with Lanz von Lebenfels.

As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and serious piece of research on
Guido von List and Lanz von Lievenfels. But the author seems a little over-sensitive toward
other writers who invoke his two subjects. Nevertheless, his critique of Angebert and
Ravenscroft, though brief, does offer a glimpse of the misgivings that professional historians
feel regarding such material.

More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph Lindenberg in his review of THE
The Spear of Destiny in the German journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has done some effective digging
at the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has Hitler sitting high up in the cheap seats of the
Vienna Opera House in the winter of 1910 - 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing
with Klingsor. This proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg learned that the first
performance of Wagner's opera took place three years later, on January 14,1914.

Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller who introduced Hitler to
drugs. "No better name occurred to him than Pretsche, popular among English writers of
fiction for German malefactors," Lindenberg writes scornfully before revealing that extensive
checks of Vienna city and business directories and police records for the years 1892
through 1920 were negative for the name in question.

Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of the Danube trip Hitler and Dr.
Stein took in May 1913, to visit the mystic woodcutter, Hands Lodz:

We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of "Wachau" as a place and not of the
region which really it is. But the details do not fit: the snow melting in May, the steamer
running in spite of the floods, bathing in the river- it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the
statement that Hitler had only one testicle... all this has been completely refuted by Werner
Maser.

Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also come in for some heavy
criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a window seat in Demel's Cafe, reading the anonymous
marginalia in the copy of Parzival he'd found and concluding they were "the footnotes of
Satan" when he looked through the glass and beheld "the most arrogant face and demonical
eyes he had ever seen". This was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an
impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed in a big black "sleazy"
coat, his toes visible through the cracks in his shoes. When in August, 1912, he sought Hitler
out at the "flophouse" he lived in , in Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler was away at
Spittal-an-der-Drau collecting a legacy left him by an aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well.

Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl, Lindenberg reports. But this happens
in March, 1911, and the aunt lived in Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern Austria.
Furthermore,

At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished conditions, rather he had always
sufficient money. In the Meldenmannstrasse, a kind of large hotel, Hitler paid a rent
of 15 Kronen a month. So he could afford a fairly expensive room and had no need
to sell his pictures, which in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that
impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat selling water colors in
front of the Cafe Dehmel does not agree with the facts either (cf. the two works
by Werner Maser who with incredible care collected all ascertained facts of
Hitler's youth).

In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke transcendent experience, Ravenscroft
has a scene in which the chief of the German general staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the
relic in the company of Conrad von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general, shortly before the
outbreak of World War I. The spear's presence led von Moltke to have a trance vision of
himself incarnated as Pope Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von Moltke, with
the balance of geopolitical power between east and west.

Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither in 1913 nor in 1914. Conrad
and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at Karlsbad, from September 7 - 10, 1913, in Silesia, and at
Leipzig on October 18 at the Centenary of the Battle of Leipzig. They had no other
meeting."

Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the assertion that "A number of
people who intimately knew Walter Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein
never met Hitler." Unfortunately Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has also afflicted his
critic, and Lindenberg nowhere names these people nor does he document his other
assertions.

Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a pollution of our spiritual
environment." And it is manifestly difficult for him or anyone to rebut research done on the
cosmic level.

What, in the end, was Hitler all about? Perhaps no better explanation can be found than W.H.
Auden's suggestions, made in his poem "September 1,1939" and printed as an epigram to
Robert G.L. Waite's book. The date is the beginning of Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland:

Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That
has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A
psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to
whom evil is done Do evil in return.